How to Submit Your Blog’s Sitemap to Google Search Console

When we create a website, one of the most common issues we must address is how to list the site in search engines like Google.

Whenever I talk to newbies who are not aware of how the search engine works, they think that they need to pay Google or other search engines to list their website. This is is not true, of course. You can show your website in a Google search for free. The only thing you need to work on is helping Google to find your blog.

Google search console (Formerly Google Webmaster Tool ) is a free tool that lets you control your website from the search engine’s perspective. I will not go into detail about GWT as I have already covered it in previous posts. In case you missed it, here is the first article to get you started:

First we need to understand what a site map is, and why submitting your sitemap to search engines is important.

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap is an XML file that contains the URLs inside your blog. This file helps crawlers to find all of the URLs of your blog.
There are many aspects of your site that a crawler will follow, such as the size of your sitemap and the number of URLs in your sitemap. In short, a sitemap is a complete index of your blog that you want search engine bots to see.

This wiki article on sitemaps will give you more technical and historical details.

Simply stated, a sitemap file contains all the URLs of your blog, and you submit that file to search engines to let them know about all the pages of your blog. Search engine bots follow sitemap files to crawl and index your website.

For a normal website, we use an online sitemap generator to create a sitemap file and submit it to webmaster tools offered by Google and Bing. For WordPress blogs, we use plugins that automatically keep updating our sitemap file as we publish the new post. This way, you don’t have to resubmit a new sitemap after publishing new articles.

It’s a good practice to place your sitemap file link at the footer of your website so that search engine bots can quickly discover and follow the site map file and crawl your blog more effectively.

Now that we know what a sitemap is, let’s move to the next level.

How to generate a sitemap for your WordPress website:

Sitemaps can be generated in different ways depending on the platform you are using for your website. For example, WordPress sitemaps can be easily generated using popular SEO plugin call Yoast SEO. Here is a guide for the same.

For another platform like those for static sites, there are many online tools and types of offline software which will help with sitemap generation. For the purpose of this post, I will assume you know how to generate a sitemap, and we will now learn how to submit that sitemap to Google.

Submitting sitemaps to Google Search console:

When we submit a sitemap to Google, we do so using the Search console tool. Assuming that you have already verified your site in Google search console and that you have logged in to your webmaster tool dashboard here, you have your sitemap link ready to go. If you have used an offline tool to generate your sitemap, upload it to the root of your site like this: /sitemap.xml

Inside your Google Webmaster Tool dashboard, on the right-hand side you will see an option called “Sitemaps”. Click on “More” to see all submitted sitemaps, or you can submit a new sitemap from there.

Click on “Add/Test Sitemap” to submit your sitemap file. On the same page, you can see which sitemaps are discovered by Google or which sitemap files have been previously submitted by you or someone from your team.

Depending on what type of sitemap you have generated, you can submit it from here. If you are running a site with lots of images, I suggest you create an image sitemap, as we already discussed in Image SEO optimization. You can also create a video sitemap for your website. For a WordPress blog, you can create image sitemaps using this WordPress plugin.

If you are submitting a sitemap for a new blog, it might take some time for you to see the index status. With index status on the same page, you can see how many URLs are submitted via sitemap and how many links Google has indexed. If you have submitted separate sitemaps for images and videos, you will see the status for those links, too. Here is an example of the index status of the ShoutMeLoud blog:

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A blog scientist by the mind and a passionate blogger by heart ❤️. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud (Award winning blog), speaker at various international forums.
Life motto: Live while you can! Teach & inspire while you could & Smile while you have the teeth.

I am using all in one SEO and inclided sitemap generation in it. did all settings, specially “Dynamicaly generate sitemaps”…. But in search console I cant see any sitemap submitted neither in my root directory. However, My website is indexed in google… Can you please help.

I have a blog with url “blogspot.in”, i submitted sitemap to google webmaster when my blog had less than 500 Posts, now my blog has around 850 Posts. Should i submit another sitemap to webmaster tool?… please reply

I have started blogging on wordpress recently. I am facing one issue that my website is not listing on google/yahoo. Even if I am searching with the same domain name. My wordpress admin side automatically submitting the sitemap but still issue persists. Can you please help me out, if I am missing something.

Hello Harsh, I want to know that there are many plugin for sitemap. Which is the best one to use please don’t say that Google XML Sitemaps is the best i like it but it’s not working fine in my of blog i just seen.

I have a website which is single page, I am unable to generate a sitemap and i have tired through many plugins, is there any tip or trick to generate sitemaps for single page website? or it is impossible?

I am facing issue in google webmasters.I submited xml sitemap to google and after a day it shows 70 submitted and 9 indexed and when check back after it shows pending for both submitted and indexed.This problem occurs everyday.Please help me sir.

Thank you for your help! I was given some ill advice by so-called ” professionals” regarding what to write in the ” ADD/TEST sitemap. Everyone was telling me to just ” type your full address + domain provider + sitemap xml” and I kept getting an error message. Thanks for the real answer and including a screenshot. Much appreciated! x

Hi Team,
I am currently building my website (which is basically an e-shop). I was wondering when is the best moment to submit the sitemap to Google? I have a coming soon page as a landing page as it will take some more time to launch the website.
I think it is meaningless to send the sitemap as the website is not finished (not even at 10%). However, I would like to generate some traffic so people interested in my product are redirected on my Coming soon page and subscribe to my newsletter.
What is the best way to do that?

Hello,
I have started blogging on wordpress. I am trying to do best SEO from my side. But I fail every time. My article comes on first page of google for only 2-3 days and after that goes to second and third page. Sometimes my site found on 8-9 page on Google. So I want to know from you that how should I do SEO so that my site will remain on the first page only.
Thank You 🙂

I am using SEO by Yoast and when I installed the Google sitemap generator , WP generated a warning about using two XML generators. Should I ignore it and continue using both or sould I remove one of them. I am a beginner and its been just 24 hours into this.

Love the blog post, but when you say “If you are submitting a sitemap for a new blog, it might take some time for you to see the index status. With index status on the same page, you can see how many URLs are submitted via sitemap and how many links Google has indexed.” can you clarify just how long the Indexed Pending status will remain so? And if you could explain what “Pending” really means, that would be appreciated. Thx!

The verification email goes into Apple mail and promptly disappears from both Apple Mail and Gmail. This may be a bug in El Capitan, so strange. It flashes, then poof, gone, nowhere to be found in junk or spam. Arg.

Sir I have blog on blogspot. As we place our sitemap file in root of our website on wordpress. But in blogspot where is our root to place file. I submitted my sitemap as using url of mywebsite/atom.xml?………….. something like that.
Is it perfect method and is it works. And when after some day i again submited sitemap of my website but it didn’t show me that sitemap name in list, so it confused me that this time I submitted sitemap or not. Sir plz guide me about sitemap, I am in very seriuos problem.

Harsh, I have SEO by Yoast plug in installed on my site which has the capability of generating sitemap. I also installed Google Sitemap generator, but I got the warning that I should not use two sitemap generators. I would like to know, shall I continue to use both or shall I choose one of them. If I need to choose one, then which one it should be?

Thanks for this great article. But I will like to ask this question. I use Yoast SEO plugin to generate Sitemap. But Yoast classifies the sitemaps into categories eg. Posts, pages and categories. I am confused whether to submit the -post xml on google search console or I should submit each blog posts to google search console? What I mean is, should I submit xml under one file name – post or should I submit each posts?

HI, first my domain was .blogspot.com but now i am purchased own domain can i submit again my sitemap to google webmaster toll. when i check my website in webmaster tool he is not shown full details of my site. like a search anlytics/search preferences/traffic and some details what i do it.

Hello thanks for this informative post, but I have one question. I have an html website but my blog section is based on wordpress, I have submitted my sitemap but it does not contain the blog url, I don’t know what is the reason behind it if you could tell,,,,,and do i have to make a sitemap separately for my blog section ???
Thankyou

honestly speaking i couldnt understand this article well. May be i am not capable enough to understand this artcle as i am a newbie to this blogging world. even it took me 3 hours to understand what the google console is and how to make google know about out site. ….:p but now it seems fruitful to me after understanding it. i have googled for above and came up with a plugin with name google xml generator. this worked for me.

I meet the problem with sitemap of Yoast seo. After add sitemap_index.xml to google console, It still display only blue color column for sent status.
But there is no any red column for Inded status, So for this case, it is PASS or FAIL? How to know the sitemap of Yoast SEO work well in this case? How to know it.

I find many forum for this error but still not have correect idea and solution. Can you help to investigate my blog for the sitemap of Yoast

I recently started a new website and struggled a lot to find how to submit my website to Google. Finally, I found this website and submit it. You explained in a very easy way, even a newbie like me submit a sitemap within 5-10 mins. Thank you very much for this post. One question though how much time it takes to show my posts on Google?

Thank for the post, I have a question that I want to say you. When I check my webmaster, there are lots of 404 error in crawl error section. I have already set 404 page on my blogger blog, but it is not working I think so please do me a favor about this how to fix that issue?

Hi Harsh,
Thanks for the informative article. I have already submitted sitemap.xml once for my site and it is getting reflected in the dashboard too. But I have a question, do I need to resubmit the sitemap, after every change on my website. I have a website wherein I add e-card for different occasions, for your reference the site is http://www[dot]peppersmile[dot]com.I would really appreciate in-case you can answer my question.

Thank you so much HARSH AGRAWAL for this interesting and well-written article. I submitted my website in google webmaster tool. All the 24 post indexed but now suddenly my posts start getting deindexed. Out of 24 Posts, 8 has already deindexed in just one week. Please guide me how to deal with it?
thankyou

Currently, I am experimenting an experiment on google. If I submit a post for the index Fetch as Google without submitting Full sitemap on google. Anybody can tell me my post will index on google or not . Also tell me any disadvantage of this.

Google Search Console is definitely one of the things I really enjoy having a look at when I start on a new website, it gives lots of insight into the website. I especially love the ranking section, it’s an absolute gold mine for long tail keywords! Great posting Harsh

Thanks a million for such a great article. I have submitted my sitemap to google search console. The sitemap (sitemap_index.xml) is generated from Yoast plugin. How can I make the site-links appear in the google search?